Earlier this month, a national daily reported that at least 325 academic papers published by Bangladeshi researchers in international journals published between 2019 and 2026 had been retracted due to various irregularities, including plagiarism. While these tainted papers have been ceremonially removed from the respectable republic of knowledge, they have perhaps helped many faculty members earn promotions or other professional perks and helped their institutions secure grants or strengthened ranking pitches. The papers are retroactively retracted, but their dividends stay on.
In the competitive world of academia, where the mantra is “publish or perish,” those who have become accustomed to academic malpractice are unlikely to be deterred by this report. Plagiarism or academic dishonesty is as ancient as the discipline itself. But with the advent of digital platforms, this menace has acquired a new architecture, accommodating a host of pseudo-experts, predatory journals, decorative research centres, conference celebrities, CV boosters and, above all, citation clubs where members refer to one another with the arrangement of the favour being reciprocated by their peers. A critical mass is manufactured that heavily tilts towards quantitative studies. This numerical accumulation produces a faux critical mass where scholarship is presented without any argumentative life. There are already concerns that AI is helping academics to write papers, reviewers to review without scholarly inputs, and publishers to publish without necessary human interventions.
The industry is supported by the forced logic of publishing only in one bibliographic database permitted by the ranking agencies. The domino effect of such a scheme is to hire faculty with PhDs and Scopus-indexed or WoS publications. Many of these journals demand hefty processing or editorial service charges. It’s a business with a purpose. STEM and, to a lesser extent, social sciences dominate this citation race. The world of science is changing so rapidly that if they don’t publish their ideas soon, new ideas will replace theirs within a short time. Humanities, in contrast, still maintain an individualistic research culture where knowledge is pursued through a qualitative or subjective manner with fewer attractions. Qualitative research from humanities and social sciences requires a longer time to publish as the findings are not going away immediately. That’s why, even within faculty members, we see a difference in research outputs. This diversity has impacted our institutions in various ways.
In recent years, we have seen academic administrators chosen based on their citations. In the process, most of the policymakers are from fields that are comfortable in converting knowledge into quantifiable metrics. It’s no accident that everyone is chasing numbers, not quality. And often, this rush is institutionalised and justified through various benchmarks.
This rush for visibility has its flaws. The recent controversy surrounding the resignation of the University of Cambridge’s Prof Jason Arday is an example. Arday was accused of plagiarism and falsifying his PhD. His removal is protested on the grounds of social mobility for minority academics. While academia should not be viewed from the narrow lens of race or ideology, the incident shows that no institution today is protected from malpractice.
The report on Bangladeshi academics made many of my colleagues and their institutions boast “marked safe” from the “ethical investigation.” But the bigger challenge is to make our education system a place for curiosity and lifelong learning. Research begins with curiosity and ends with finding solutions. Unfortunately, the external factors tied to the cottage industry of publication, promotion and ranking are turning research into a commodity. Those involved in the market have thoroughly studied the playbook. They know the rules of the game as well as its cheat codes.
Research today is more about using technology and knowing the permissible range of machine-produced works. The machine can quickly transform thoughts into papers. You just need to rearrange some sentences, replace words here and there, or ask the machine to “humanise” your language. It took me six years to complete my PhD and turn it into a monograph. And now I see people churning out two books and 10 articles a year. I look at my lean CV and wonder where I went wrong. Then I examine works produced under a kaleidoscope. Same information presented under different lights. The journal establishes a pattern that you are expected to follow. Intellectual ownership disappears beneath procedural compliance.
But to be in the game, it is common knowledge that institutions must act like a reluctant policeman. They ignore the issue until it attracts attention. The thief wants the publication; the university wants the number. Nobody is interested in asking unsavoury questions.
AI enters the scene like a dragon. Old school archival or lab research exits the scene like a tiger with its former glory. You no longer need to sit in the corner of a library to compile information from 100 different books, request an inter-library loan, watch the microfiche, and so on. AI has made it swifter to travel across libraries. In the process, the very labour education is supposed to cultivate is outsourced and offloaded. In the late 1960s, French philosopher Roland Barthes provocatively declared the death of an author the moment a text is produced and reclaimed by the reader. The concept is concrete now more than ever. We are experiencing a phenomenon where writing is possible without authorship. References can be construed without reading. Scholarly writings are devoid of scholarship. Universities are patronising this soulless activity because without reputation, students won’t be interested in them.
While we use AI, the new tool of plagiarism, we must remain aware of the plausible sequences from an inherited archive. Research, by design, is supposed to discover what the archive cannot yet predict. Hence, research today is becoming an echo chamber where scholars are citing one another and gurgling the same materials in hygienic prose.
Let me end with an epigraph used by Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was also accused of plagiarism. In the beginning of his poem “Dejection: An Ode,” Coleridge quotes a ballad by Sir Patrick Spens to describe the sight of “the new Moon / With the old Moon in her arms.” The image of a new moon with the shadowy presence of the old moon can be a true metaphor of contemporary academic production. The paper that appears to be new carries the shadow of many old texts. As the old saying goes, when the old and the new are sighted together, a storm is sure to come. The news report mentioned earlier has brought the old debate of academic malpractices to the fore. One can only hope once the storm is over, we will get a clearer picture.
Dr Shamsad Mortuza is vice-chancellor at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB).
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries, and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our guidelines for submission.
